Deeplinks Blog posts about DMCA

When a statute is clear, judges are supposed to follow it or explain, in some detail, why they shouldn’t. That’s why we were disappointed by this week's ruling in Tuteur v. Crosley Corcoran. In the ruling, the judge suggests that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) does not require the sender of a takedown notice to affirm anything except its belief that the targeted material is being used without permission from the owner or its agent. Trouble is, the statute says something very different, i.e., that the sender must affirm that the material is not authorized by “the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.”

When will they ever learn? The Alberta tourism bureau—which shares a law firm with some of the Canadian province's major oil companies—used a copyright takedown notice to try to smother a movie trailer that satirizes Alberta's oil sands project. The two-and-a-half-minute trailer used about four seconds of an Alberta travel advertisement to contrast its lush nature shots with images of environmental destruction in the oil fields, and to satirize its "Remember to Breathe" slogan. These are fair uses that should have been obvious to Travel Alberta's lawyers, and ordering the trailer down earns Travel Alberta a place in EFF's Takedown Hall of Shame.

In yet another step down what could be a slippery slope toward an elaborate extralegal IP enforcement regime, several major Internet advertising networks announced an agreement this week on how they will treat "pirate sites." The good news: the "best practices" could be much much worse. The bad news: once again, Internet users weren't given a seat at the negotiating table.

Today, EFF announced that it was making a formal objection to including consideration of digital rights management (DRM) in the First Public Working Draft from the HTML working group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This is part of EFF's long-running involvement in standards processes, fighting the entertainment companies and DRM vendors that want permanent control over disruptive technologies.